“Do you know anything about Mr. Treverton?” asked Laura, thoughtfully.
“Very little. He is an only son—an only child, I believe. His father and mother died while he was a boy, and he became a ward in Chancery. He had a nice little property when he came of age, and ran through it nicely, after the manner of idle young men without friends to advise and guide them. He began his career in the army, but sold out after he had spent his money. I have no idea what he has been doing since—living by his wits, I’m afraid.”
So it was settled that Laura was to remain at the Manor House, with so many of the old servants as would suffice to keep things in good order—the servants to be paid and fed at the expense of the estate, Laura to maintain herself out of her own modest income. She was a young lady of particularly independent temper, and upon this point she was resolute.
“The money is nobody’s money at present,” she said. “I will not touch a penny of it.”
Sad as were the associations of the house, dreary as was the blank left in the familiar rooms by the absence of one revered figure, dismal as was the silence which that voice could never break again, Laura was better pleased to stay in her old home than she would have been to leave it. Even the mute, lifeless things among which she had lived so long had some part of her some hold upon her heart. She would have felt herself a waif and stray in a stranger’s house. Here she felt always at home. If the rooms were haunted by the shadow of the dead, the ghost was a friendly one, and looked upon her with loving eyes. She had never thwarted, or neglected, or wronged her adopted father. There was no remorse mingled with her grief. She thought of him with deepest sadness, but without pain.
The vicar was anxious that Miss Malcolm should have a companion. There were plenty of homeless young women—women of spotless reputation and genteel connections—who would no doubt have been delighted to be her unsalaried companion, for the sake of a pleasant home. But Laura declared that she wanted no companion.
“You must think me very empty-minded if you suppose I cannot endure my life without a young woman of the same age to sit opposite me and answer to all my idle fancies like an echo, or to walk out with me and help me to admire the landscape, or to advise me what I should order for dinner,” she said. “No, dear Mr. Clare, I want no companion, except Celia now and then. You will let her come and see me very often, won’t you?”
“As often as you like, or as often as she can be spared from her parish work,” answered the Vicar.
“Ah, you are all such hard workers at the Vicarage,” exclaimed Laura.
“Some of us work hard enough, I believe,” answered Mr. Clare, with a sigh. “I wish my son could make up his mind to work a little harder.”
“That will come in good time.”
“I hope so, but I am almost tired of waiting for that good time.”
“He is clever and artistic,” said Laura.
“His cleverness allowed him to leave the University without a degree, and his artistic faculties will never help him to a living,” answered the Vicar, bitterly.
This only son of the Vicar’s was a thorn in his side. Edward Clare was everybody’s favourite, and nobody’s enemy but his own. That was what the village said of him. He was good-looking, clever, agreeable, but he had no ballast. He was a feather to be blown by every puff of wind. He had never been able to discover the work which he had been sent into the world to do, but he had speedily found out the work for which he was not adapted. At the University he discovered that the curriculum of an English classical education was not fitted to the peculiar cast of his mind. How much better he could have done at Heidelberg or Bonn! But when he made this discovery he had wasted three years at Oxford, and had cost his father something very close to a thousand pounds.
The Vicar wanted his only son to go into the Church, and Edward had been educated with that view, but after failing to get his degree, Edward found out that he had a conscientious repugnance to the Church. His opinions were too broad.
“A man who admires Ernest Renan as warmly as I do has no right to be a parson,” said Edward, with agreeable frankness; so poor Mr. Clare had to submit to the disappointment of his most cherished hopes, because his son admired Renan.
After having made up his mind upon this point Edward stayed at home, read a good deal in a desultory way, wrote a little, sketched a little in fine weather, fished, shot, and dawdled away life in the pleasantest manner, finding his days never so sweet as when they were spent at the Manor House.
Jasper Treverton had warmly esteemed the Vicar, and he had liked the son for the father’s sake. Edward had always been welcome at the Manor House while the old man lived, and as Edward’s sister was Laura Malcolm’s chosen friend, it was natural that the Oxonian should be very often in Laura’s society.
But now his visits to the good old house where he had felt himself so completely at home, the library in which he had read, the garden in whose formal walks he had delighted to smoke, were suddenly restricted. Miss Malcolm had given him to understand, through his sister, that she considered herself no longer at liberty to receive him. Her friendship for him was in no wise lessened, but it would not do for him to drop in at all hours, or to spend half his afternoons in
